Cardano Vasil hardfork countdown begins

Cardano has announced the opening of a 4-week window for developers of decentralized applications (dApps) and software engineers at cryptocurrency exchanges to test the protocol’s upcoming upgrade before it is launched onto the main network.

Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the developers behind this upgrade ,have pointed out that this is the most significant upgrade undertaken on the Ouroboros protocol to date.

What the Vasil hardfork entails

The latest update will bring capability upgrades and significant performance to the chain. Aside from that, it will improve script performance for developers, and lower costs by providing higher throughput. The Vasil hardfork is trending because of the lesser impact the Alonzo update had on stakeholders of the project which was evident in the 11 decentralized applications on the blockchain, according to DeFiLlama.

As one of the few chains that have found an answer to the blockchain trilemma (decentralization, security, and scalability), the update will come with the implementation of diffusion pipelining. This would improve the scalability of the blockchain for the creation of dApps. Last year, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson pointed out that the protocol will host thousands of applications by the end of 2021. Unfortunately, this has not been the case as projects such as Avalanche (AVAX) and Solana (SOL) have attracted substantial market share due to Hoskinson’s project not reaching full functionality, as per the roadmap given to its followers.

Through this update, block creation will be relatively faster since they would not need full validation before transmission. This will pave the way for developers to finally build their dApps on one of the most vibrant ecosystems in the space. Based on analytics from Santiment (a data tracking tool), the protocol leads the entire space concerning development activity in June.

Projects such as Kusama and Polkadot trail the Cardano, which has also been dubbed as the potential Ethereum Killer. Despite naysayers such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet’s opposition to Bitcoin, many analysts believe the Cardano crash will not last long. Digital Coin Price forecasts ADA to reach an average price of $0.58, a minimum price of $0.54, and a maximum price of $0.62 by the end of 2022.